The Distribution of Lobbying Activities Across a Sample of Issues

We analyze the structure of interest group activity across a random sample of national policy issues, drawn from a universe of 29,892 issue-mentions in the 1996 Lobbying Disclosure Reports. The results show a tremendous skewness to the distribution of lobbying in Washington. The median issue saw only fifteen lobbyists; however, a small proportion of issues was the object of veritable lobbying frenzies: seven of the 142 issues we studied were mentioned by more than 200 lobbyists. We combine this finding about the distribution of interest group activity with an analysis of how the type of participant varies across issues of varying scopes. Although business interests are, not surprisingly, the most common type of interest represented in the lobbying reports, we find that businesses are particularly over-represented on issues in which there are few or no competing interests involved. We discuss the implications of this representational bias